ABOUT BOMONSTER

BOMONSTER is a California artist who grew up watching his dad build his own low budget race cars during the week and then race those prototype contraptions at weekend drag races all over Southern California. At San Gabriel, Lions, Colton, Fontana and Pomona’s now legendary quarter-mile strip, he witnessed the rise of many great racers with nicknames like “Big Daddy,” “TV,” “Cookie,” “Mongoose,” and “Snake.” He watched famous cars like “Pure Hell,” “Hemi Under Glass,” and “Little Red wagon” wheelie their way into the collective history of today’s drag racing buffs.

It was during those formative years that BOMONSTER discovered a new art form being perpetrated on young minds everywhere: hot rod art. From t-shirt artists airbrushing at car shows to underground comics, model car kits and tattoos, the beginning of a self-taught, lowbrow, no-rules style based on the tire-smoking performance of hopped-up cars driven by monsters began to find its way into the world of surfing, dirt bikes, skateboarding, album covers, enthusiast magazines and hobby shops all across the country.

BOMONSTER’s career has taken him all over the world creating advertising images for clients like Porsche, Apple, Acura, Yamaha and Nissan. When he went back to creating art for fun, he went back to those early influences. BOMONSTER says “In every city I would visit contemporary art galleries and museums, look at great art and say ‘I could do that.’ – but never actually do it until just a few years ago when I picked up a knife and scratched out some hot rods. It was other artists who encouraged me to develop my art chops and to share it with the rest of the world. Now I scratch something new every week to try and make up for lost time, get better and to provide an outlet for all the crazy ideas I have.”

What is scratchboard art? It’s basically the art of drawing with a sharp knife. Each board starts out as a white clay-coat surface on a Masonite baseboard. A smooth layer of black ink is applied to the surface of the white clay-coat. The black ink is scraped away with a sharp Xacto blade revealing the slightly twisted image lurking just below the surface.

If you’d like to reach BOMONSTER to talk about a project or if you have questions about how he creates his unique work, contact him here